pcrecording
My system build I thought was adequate enough to record most games with great ease, but I'm facing issues. I can record at 720p no problem, any game. I want to be able to record at 1080p, but when I try my system begins to bog down and gameplay becomes choppy. How can I improve this?
Fraps is the most popular tool for recording in game videos.
Update: dxTory seems to be stealing a lot of Frap's userbase now, and according to Totalbiscuit suffers less frame drops.
Fraps is a universal Windows application that can be used with games using DirectX or OpenGL graphic technology. In its current form Fraps performs many tasks and can best be described as:
Benchmarking Software - Show how many Frames Per Second (FPS) you are getting in a corner of your screen. Perform custom benchmarks and measure the frame rate between any two points. Save the statistics out to disk and use them for your own reviews and applications.
Screen Capture Software - Take a screenshot with the press of a key! There's no need to paste into a paint program every time you want a new shot. Your screen captures are automatically named and timestamped.
Realtime Video Capture Software - Have you ever wanted to record video while playing your favourite game? Come join the Machinima revolution! Throw away the VCR, forget about using a DV cam, game recording has never been this easy! Fraps can capture audio and video up to 2560x1600 with custom frame rates from 10 to 120 frames per second!
All movies are recorded in outstanding quality. If you have Windows Media Player please sample some of the movies captured with Fraps below:
This is assuming you are using the composite video to play on your PS2. I'm also assuming that there aren't any other differences in equipment in different parts of the world (me being in the US and you apparently in Australia). Also note that I myself don't own a PS2 nor have I ever really used it much, but it should be the same for any console really. I'll also assume you don't have not-so-old equipment. So everything I mention here I'll assume your equipment has as these are fairly standard nowadays.
You'll need 2 things first, a "male-to-male" RCA-cable and a video recording device. Here, I'll use a VCR as an example.
To be able to play your PS2 on your TV, you will probably have one of many different setups for it to work. A common one is to just connect your PS2 directly to your TV using RCA video cables (the yellow/white/red set of cables).
The cables will usually go to (one of) the "video in" connections in the back of the TV to your PS2 in the appropriate connector. It will probably look like this (other unrelated details left out):
And this is how you can play your games. The signal comes out of your PS2 and goes into your TV. You can see the results on your TV.
Now to the recording. Your TV will probably have a "video out" connection too. This would allow the signals your TV receives to send it out to another device. We want these signals to go out into our recording device so it can record it. We could use a VCR to do this. Record it on tape and you're good to go. To connect it, connect the RCA cable from the TV's "video out" to your VCR's "video in" (it might be called "line in" instead). So it should look like this in the end:
Once you have this all set, all you have to do is start playing, load a blank tape into the VCR and start recording. Then you can share the tape with your friend. Simple right?
Best Answer
Turns out the problem was my hard drives after all. Bottlenecking was a major issue, despite being 7200RPM and SATA 3Gb/s which I amount to being a fairly good system.
After investigating Dxtory further, I found that using the RawCap file format allows the program to record the file over multiple hard drives, and comes with software to combine them all into a single AVI file which would then need to be rendered.
As proof, I did a Path of Exile recording test while in windowed fullscreen. 1080p was no problem at all.